By
Darkwiccan
Rating: PG
Disclaimers: Willow and Tara and other characters borrowed from the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer are the property of their creator, Joss Whedon, and his affiliates, Mutant Enemy, Fox, and UPN. Jeeves is the creation of P.G. Wodehouse and the property of Dover Publications and (I'm assuming) the Wodehouse Estate.
Summary: The continued zany adventures of a silly upper-class British gentlewoman named Willow Rosenby and her remarkable servant Giles. Set in the mid-1920’s. (I'd originally set the time-period as around 1915, but after many years, realized these escapades fit more naturally into the 1920's)
Note: You may want to read “Leave it to Giles” or “The Inimitable Giles” before you read this story. Two reasons... one, you'll get better accustomed to the jargon and two, you'll have a better understanding of what the frilly heck is going on.
This story is complete. I will be posting the chapters in installments. I'm starting off with the first two chapters in this initial posting. Going forward, updates will be added on Tuesdays in keeping with the tradition of B:tVS air dates.
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Chapter 1
Being a rather bonnie bird with a rather constant disposition of the sunny sort, I find many things delight me. Be they exciting or droll, or rather fuzzy or shiny sorts of things, I like them. But, I dare say, there is nothing I delight in more than the holidays. By Jove, the holidays are indeed a scrumptious time full of yummies for one’s tum and presents to warm one’s heart and feet. And, quite rightly, I find the notion of Santa Claus tumbling down chimneys to be very bright! Here’s this rather jolly sort of fellow whose raison d'être, as it were, is to bring you things that make you happy. Rather like my man, Giles, you know.
Giles, my valet, is really a tremendous fellow. He has a sort of omnipresence about him that instills one with a sense of ease and safety and thoughts of everything’s going to be just right. Why, if it weren’t for my man Giles and his massive brain I wouldn’t have met my darling Tara. Tara: the light of my life, the apple of my eye and so many other clever sayings. I shall be forever grateful to Giles for scheming us together, and it was due to this very gratitude that I set about to searching for the perfect Christmas gift to thank him with.
But there was the rub, as they say, what sort of thing to get? I was having the most awfully rummy time trying to come up with any sort of jolly ideas to suit the man. It had been almost a year since I had found it necessary to force the old melon to consider anything of gravity. The bean thumped horribly as I sorted out the possibilities. A book? Surely the chap has read them all. Why his cerebellum certainly devours old pages for breakfast and tea. A tie, or some other sort of thing for wearing? Unfortunately, Giles has never been keen on my superior sense of fashion, so that notion was sent packing, mauve trousers and all. I had thought of creeping about his room for clues, but I’ve never been good at that sort of thing, always getting caught with my hand in a drawer and other such pippingly awkward scenarios.
I decided to confer with Tara on the matter. She was the sort of girl who was quiet and sympathetic, to whom you could tell your troubles to in the certain confidence of having your hand held and your head patted. The sort of girl to whom you could go to and say, “I say, I’ve just murdered someone and I’m really rather worried about it,” and she would reply, “There, there, try not to think about it, these sort of things happen.” The little mother, in short, with the added attraction of being thoroughly in love with me.
“Willow, my dear,” she said to me after I had proffered my pontificating, “you are simply adorable.” I felt my chest puff proudly even as my cheeks shone with a rather clownish red. She went on, “so sweet of you to think of Giles at this time of year.”
“Yes, well,” I said, “certainly the time of year for it. Holly and bells and festive whatnots dangling about and putting one in a gay mood. I just haven’t the foggiest what to give the old boy.”
“Well, Willow, rather fortunately, as Giles was accompanying me to the dressmakers, we got to talking of our hobbies.”
“Hobbies, you say?” I asked, “Dashed economic with his time, that Giles. I’d never have puzzed out when he’d get ‘round to such things as hobbies. What’s he at, then? Trains? Bottle caps? The odd tiny-ship-in-even-tinier-bottle biz?”
“Actually, he confided in me that he rather enjoys collecting old serving ware.”
“Serving ware?” I was at once aghast and confused. A not uncommon pairing for myself, I should say. “Certainly not! You mean he has a fondness for old soup taurines and platters and the like? But, my dear, that is so near to what he does, you know, as a valet. Aren’t hobbies meant to distract one away from one’s daily profession?”
“I suppose for some,” Tara conceded, “but he did express his fondness for them to me. In fact, as we passed by an antique shop in Brompton Road he indicated to a charming old creamer that he said he’d had his eye on for quite some time. Perhaps you could get him that.”
“But dearest, wouldn’t that be rather like giving the maid a new feather thingummy whatsit?”
“Duster?”
“Yes, one of those. Rather heartless, I’d say. ‘Happy Christmas, now back to work, you can start with the tree.’”
“Perhaps. But what if it’s what she really wanted?”
I felt the old lemon squeeze itself to knotty pulp. This was all too much thinking for a bird out of practice. Well, what of it, I thought to myself, I hadn’t a bally clue what to get Giles for Christmas, and if an old cream dispenser would suit him fine, well by Jove, it suited me.
“Right then,” I said, “what’s the jug look like?”
“A cow.”
“I’m sorry, did you say a cow?”
“Yes, darling. It’s a charming little thing in the shape of a cow. Most unusual and quite a collector’s piece, or so Giles tells me. Eighteenth century I think he said.”
I decided not to question the oddity of it and press on. “Good egg! I’ll pop down to the shop tomorrow.”
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Chapter 2
The next morning as I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Giles had given of his plenty, I was conscious of a strange exhilaration, if I’ve got the word right. I’d resolved as soon as I’d finished to sup, it was off to the shops to bid in on the bovine bottle for Giles. I was feeling rather bright-ish and full of pepper. As schemes go, and believe me I know of schemes having been caught up in them more often than I’d care to, sneaking off to the shops to procure my valet a pygmy trifle of my appreciation for him was a snap, as they say, and a particularly merry undertaking.
“These eggs, Giles,” I said, “Very good. Very tasty.”
“Yes, miss?”
“Laid, no doubt, by contented hens. And the coffee, perfect. Nor must I omit to give word of praise to the bacon. I wonder if you notice anything about me this morning.”
“You seem in good spirits, miss.”
“Yes, Giles, I am happy today.”
“I am very glad to hear it, miss.”
“You might say I’m sitting on top of the world with a rainbow ‘round my shoulder.”
“A most satisfactory state of affairs, miss.”
“What’s the word I’ve heard you use from time to time? Eu, something?”
“Euphoria, miss?”
“That’s the one. I’ve seldom had a sharper attack of euphoria. I feel full to the brim with Vitamin B. Would you like to know why, Giles?”
“If you feel so inclined as to relate the reasoning, miss.”
“Christmas Spirit, Giles! Christmas spirit. It’s all around us, don’t you know! Even as the snow falls the soul warms and the heart is fuzzy with peace on Earth and good will to old men, or is it all men – I say, what about the women? There’s a bit of a rum go, not mentioning us.”
“I do believe, miss, the phrase ‘good will to all men’ is in fact a reference to all mankind which would, I am certain, include women, miss.”
“Well, that’s a deep swell of the fresh into the old lungs. For a moment I thought we’d been given a-miss.”
“I am relieved to know that the clouds have lifted. Your elbow is in the butter, miss.”
“Oh, thank you, Giles.”
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It was with a light heart that I went out into the street and hailed a passing barouche. I was conscious only of the pleasure at the thought that I had it in my power to perform this little act of kindness. Scratch Willow Rosenby, I often say, and you find a Girl Scout.
The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road and, like all antique shops except the swanky ones in the Bond Street neighborhood, dingy outside and dark and smelly within. I don’t know why it is, but the proprietors of these establishments always seem to be cooking some sort of stew in the back room.
“I say”, I began, entering; then paused as I perceived that the bloke in charge was attending to two other customers.
“Oh, sorry,” I was about to add, to convey the idea that I had horned in inadvertently, when the words froze on my lips.
Quite a stab of misty fruitfulness had drifted into the emporium, obscuring the view, but in spite of the poor light I was able to note that the smaller and elder of these two customers was no stranger to me.
It was old Sir Quentin Travers in person. Himself. Not a picture. Pop Travers was an old friend of my Uncle Willoughby, for whom I am named. In addition to being an old friend of Unc’s, he is also an old, and by old I mean aged, near-sighted and generally unpleasant, judge of the lower courts. You know, the johnnies who deal with bonnet-pinchers and purse-stealers and the like, and for some reason, as long as I can remember, Old Pop Travers has always confused me as being one of the many dishonest birds brought before his billowing robes. I’d say that I must have one of those faces, but I’d rather not think such things about myself. At any rate, as a result, I’ve never been fond of the shrimp-faced son of a whatnot.
There is a tough, bulldog strain in the Rosenby’s which has often caused comment. It came out in me now. A weaker person, no doubt, would have tiptoed from the scene and head for the horizon, but I stood firm and gave him the surreptitious once-over.
My entry had caused him to turn and shoot a quick look at me, and at intervals since then he had been peering at me side-ways. It was only a question of time, I felt, before the hidden chord in his mis-memory would be touched and he would confuse this slight, distinguished looking figure, leaning on her umbrella, yet again with a recent defendant. And now it was plain that he was hep. The ancient fellow in charge of the shop had pottered off into an inner room, and old Travers came across to where I stood, giving me the up-and-down through his windshields.
“Hullo, hullo,” he said, “I know you, young lady. I never forget a face. You came before me once.”
“We have met before, Sir Quentin, but I am sorry to disappoint you, dear fellow,” I said rather firmly, in the hopes of shaking his memory to rights, “but I am in fact a relative of your old friend Lord Willoughby. We’ve met before at Easeby, if you recall.”
He eyed me rather like a fish. “Bag-snatching,” he stated through slitted eyes. “I remember it distinctly. You can’t fool me, my dear. I never forget a face. Still, it’s all past and done with now, eh? We have turned over a new leaf, have we not?”
“If in fact there were any leaves to turn, old Travers, but as I said--”
“Tut, tut, my dear girl, it’s pointless to try, I remember all my cases with utter clarity. Still, I understand your desire to put it behind you, looking so well as you do now. Splendid. Luke, come over here. This is most interesting.”
His buddy, who had been examining a salver, put it down and joined the party.
He was, I had already been able to perceive, a breathtaking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across. He caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.
But it wasn’t merely the expanse of the bloke that impressed. Close to, what you noticed more was his face, which was squared and powerful and slightly mustached towards the center. His gaze was keen and piercing. I don’t know if you have even seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of opening a new skittle alley, but that is what he reminded me of.
“Luke,” said old Travers, “I want you to meet this young lady. Here is a case which illustrates exactly what I have so often maintained – that prison life does not degrade, that it does not warp the character and prevent men and women from rising on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.”
I recognized the gag – one of Giles’ – and wondered where he could have heard it.
“Look at this girl. I gave her three months not long ago for snatching bags at railway stations, and it is quite evident that her term in jail has had the most excellent effect on her. She has reformed.”
“Oh, yes?” said the Dictator.
Granted, it wasn’t quite, “Oh, yeah?” I still didn’t like the way he spoke. He was looking at me with a nasty sort of supercilious expression.
“What makes you think she has reformed?”
“Of course she has reformed. Look at her. Well groomed, well dressed, a decent member of Society. What her present walk in life is, I do not know, but it is perfectly obvious that she is no longer stealing bags. What are you doing now, young lady?”
“Stealing umbrellas, apparently,” said the Dictator. “I notice she’s got yours.”
And I was on the point of denying the accusation hotly – I had, indeed, already opened my lips to do so – when there suddenly struck me like a blow on the upper maxillary from a sock stuffed with wet sand the realization that there was a lot in it.
I mean to say, I remembered now that I had come out without my umbrella, and yet here I was, beyond any question of a doubt, umbrella’d to the gills. What had caused me to take up the one leaning against a seventeenth century chair, I cannot say, unless it was the primeval instinct which makes a bird without an umbrella reach for the nearest one in sight, like a flower groping toward the sun.
A strong apology seemed in order. I made it as the blunt instrument changed hands.
“I say, I’m most frightfully sorry.”
Old Travers said he was too – sorry and disappointed. He said it was this sort of thing that made him sick at heart.
The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Travers’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood. But he shook his head.
“No, Lucas, I couldn’t. Not today – the happiest day of my life.”
The Dictator pursed his lips, as if feeling that the better the day, the better the deed.
“But listen,” I bleated, “it was a mistake.”
“Ha!” said the Dictator.
“I thought the umbrella was mine.”
“That,” said old Travers, “is the fundamental trouble with you, my girl. You are totally unable to distinguish between mine and yours. Well, I am not going to have you arrested this time, but I advise you to be very careful. Come, Luke.”
They biffed out, the Dictator pausing at the door to give me another look and say, “Ha!” again.
A most unnerving experience all this had been for a girl of sensibility, as you may imagine, and my immediate reaction was a disposition to give the idea of Giles’ present the miss-in-balk and return to the flat. I realized now what madness it had been to go into the streets of London alone, and I was on the point of melting away and going back to the fountain head, when the proprietor of the shop emerged from the inner room, accompanied by a rich smell of stew and a sandy cat, and enquired what he could do for me. And so, the subject having come up, I said that I understood that he had an eighteenth-century cow-creamer for sale.
He nodded his head. He was a rather mildewed fellow of gloomy aspect, almost entirely concealed behind a cascade of white whiskers.
“Right-o, thou of unshuffled features and agreeable disposition”, I said, for one likes to be civil, “how much for the thing?”
“Fifty pounds.”
I goggled at the ancient face. Fifty pounds for a trifle thing barely over a hundred years old? Bally mad, I say! I decided I would have to sap the fellow of the confidence in his price and asked to see the thing. Perhaps if I sneered at it well enough, he’d be inspired to cheapen it by a few bob.
I don’t mind confessing that I’m not much of a bird for old silver, so I wasn’t expecting the heart to leap up to any great extent at the sight of this exhibit. But when the whiskered ancient pottered off into the shadows and came back with the thing, I scarcely knew whether to laugh or weep. The thought of Giles’ paying hard cash for such an object got right in amongst me.
It was a silver cow. But when I say “cow”, don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out the side of its mouth for a tuppence. It was about four inches high and six long. Its back opened with a hinge. Its tail was arched, so that the tip touched the spine – thus, I suppose, affording a handle for the cream-lover to grasp. The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.
It was, consequently, an easy task for me to give it a good sneering at. I curled the lip and clicked the tongue, all in one movement. I also drew in the breath sharply. The whole effect was of one absolutely out of sympathy with this cow-creamer, and I saw the mildewed cove start, as if he had been wounded in a tender spot. I decided to go in for the kill and declare it not to even be an antique, though plainly it was. It was worth it for the haggle.
“Oh, tut, tut, tut! I said, “Oh, dear, dear, dear! Oh, no, no, no, no, no! I don’t think much of this, “ I said, curling and clicking freely. “All wrong.”
“All wrong?”
“All wrong. Modern Dutch.”
“Modern Dutch?” He may have frothed at the mouth, or he may not. I couldn’t be sure. But the agony of spirit was obviously intense. “What do you mean, Modern Dutch? It’s eighteenth-century English. Look at the hallmark.”
“I can’t see any hallmark.”
“Are you blind? Here, take it outside to the street. It’s lighter there.”
“Right ho,” I said, and started for the door, sauntering at first in a languid sort of way, like a connoisseur a bit bored at having her time wasted.
I say “at first” because I had only taken a couple of steps when I tripped over the cat, and you can’t combine tripping over cats with languid sauntering. Shifting abruptly into high, I shot out of the door like someone wanted by the police making for the door after a smash-and-grab raid. The cow-creamer flew from my hands, and it was a lucky thing that I happened to barge into a fellow citizen outside, or I should have taken a toss in the gutter.
Well, not absolutely lucky, as a matter of fact, for it turned out to be Sir Quentin Travers. He stood there goggling at me with horror and indignation behind the pince-nez, and you could almost see him totting up the score on his fingers. First, bag-snatching, I mean to say; then umbrella-pinching; and now this. His whole demeanor was that of a man confronted with the last straw.
“Call a policeman, Lucas!” He cried, skipping like the high hills.
The Dictator sprang to the task.
“Police!” He bawled.
“Police!” yipped old Travers, up in the tenor clef.
“Police!” roared the Dictator, taking the bass.
And a moment later, something large loomed up in the fog and said: “What’s all this?”
Well, I dare say I could have explained everything, if I had stuck around and gone into it a bit, but I didn’t want to stick around and go into it. Side-stepping nimbly, I picked up the feet and was gone like the wind. A voice shouted, “Stop!” but of course I didn’t. Stop, I mean to say! Of all the damn silly ideas. I legged it down byways along side streets, and eventually fetched up somewhere in the neighborhood of Sloane Square. There I got aboard a cab and started back to civilization.
I arrived home to find a pile of telegrams on the table.
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To Be Continued...
It wasn't absent when she showed up before, but it really stood out to me this chapter how - without Willow's unique narration style being lessened - there's this really obvious adoration that shines through. It's a clever balancing act in how you write for Willow there, 'silly' yet sincere, conveying the depth of feeling between them while still keeping the actual narrative light and breezy, the way Willow would describe it to someone.